Painting and Misappropriation

Since 2003, American artist Richard Phillips (born 1964) has made numerous appropriations of paintings by the Swiss artist Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957). Phillips shares with Dietrich a fondness for such subjects as animals, people and landscapes, stylized into an extreme degree of artifice. Phillips' appropriations and quotations of Dietrich's motifs orient his own aims firmly within the logic of art history (specifically the modernist canon), and Dietrich, known in his day as "the...
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Since 2003, American artist Richard Phillips (born 1964) has made numerous appropriations of paintings by the Swiss artist Adolf Dietrich (1877-1957). Phillips shares with Dietrich a fondness for such subjects as animals, people and landscapes, stylized into an extreme degree of artifice. Phillips' appropriations and quotations of Dietrich's motifs orient his own aims firmly within the logic of art history (specifically the modernist canon), and Dietrich, known in his day as "the German Rousseau," and winning acclaim under the constrained terms of "naïve," also proves to be a sophisticated modernist artist. In this volume, published to accompany an exhibition at the Swiss Institute in New York, Phillips' works are presented alongside Dietrich's, accompanied by an essay on Dietrich by Phillips, a conversation between Beatrix Ruf and Phillips, a text by Dietrich scholar Dorothee Mesmer and an introduction by Gianni Jetzer and Markus Landert.